I came across a really interesting piece on AlterNet, detailing the efforts of Big Pharma to develop and patent cannabis-based medicines.
Apparently, pharmaceutical companies think medical marijuana delivered as patented pills, oral sprays and in other forms could be a real cash cow. They think this benefit would more than offset any loss of revenues from people turning to roll-your-own solutions.
Here’s an excerpt from the story:
Big Pharma is busily applying for — and has already received — multiple patents for the medical properties of pot …
… as the private sector continues to move forward with research into the safety and efficacy of marijuana-based pharmaceuticals, it will become harder and harder for the government and law enforcement to maintain their absurd and illogical policy of total pot prohibition.
Of course, were it not for advocates having worked for four decades to legalize medical cannabis, it’s unlikely that anyone — most especially the pharmaceutical industry — would be turning their attention toward the development and marketing of cannabis-based therapeutics.
In the United States, we’re trained virtually from birth to value brand names — in fact, often to overvalue them.
Did you know, for example, that when large corporations buy one another, they often have to pay millions — or even billions — of dollars for something accountants call “intangible assets”? One of these assets — called “goodwill” — can be thought of as the value of the brand. It reflects the profits a company makes over and above what you’d expect from the tangible assets alone, simply because of its reputation.
Big pharmaceutical companies want you to buy into the value of brands when purchasing prescription medications — so you’ll pay more for them. That’s one of the reasons they spend so much on advertising.
The problem for Big Pharma, however, is that once a brand-name drug’s patent runs out, the value of the brand name (logically at least) is nil.
What would the value of Coca-Cola’s brand be if everyone were allowed to make soft drinks using Coke’s formula? How about if KFC had to share Colonel Sanders’ secret recipe? It would diminish quite a bit, wouldn’t it?
In the pharmaceutical business, once a drug’s patent runs out, the FDA (or equivalent regulatory bodies in Canada and elsewhere) basically allows the secret recipe for the drug to be given to other qualified drug makers, who create generic versions of the drug. Because the generic drug makers don’t spend billions of dollars on marketing, research and development, they can charge significantly less for the drug than the original drug manufacturer.
At that point, it just doesn’t make sense to buy the brand name version of the drug. It’s like paying for the designer label on your shirt rather than the shirt itself. And is ANYONE really impressed by the fact that you use brand-name drugs? (I didn’t think so.)
Two informative news reports over the past few days, one from KING5 in Seattle/Tacoma (looking at over-the-counter meds) and another from a pharmacist writing for an Ohio newspaper (focusing on prescription drugs), look into the difference between brand and generic drugs and come to the same conclusion: the only difference is the price.
This is obviously why large pharmaceutical companies are now lobbying state legislatures to make it more difficult to substitute generic drugs for brand drugs when your doctor writes the name of the brand drug on your prescription. From Delmarva Now:
Pharmacists are usually authorized to automatically substitute generics for brand-name drugs — unless specifically instructed not to do so. Major drugmakers are fighting back by lobbying state legislatures to make it more difficult to make substitutions, seeking to require direct communication between doctor and pharmacist before making each switch. Maryland’s General Assembly considered two such bills during the 2008 legislative session and will likely see similar proposals in 2009.
While doctors may have legitimate reasons to prefer a brand-name drug, they also have the option to make that specification on a prescription. There is no need for a phone call to a busy doctor every time a prescription is filled.
This lobbying is an attempt to protect pharmaceutical profits by making it more difficult to purchase generic drugs. Since many insurance plans will not pay for a brand-name drug once the generic is available, this could end up costing patients a lot more –or forcing them to forego a medication altogether.
So don’t be fearful of generic drugs — and fight for your right to buy them if you need to. They’re not inferior to brand-name drugs; they just cost less.
We’ve gotten thousands of first-time visitors since we launched the eDrugSearch.com Community in late February. So I’ve decided, every once and a while, to post some basic information to help explain why we do what we do here, and why we’re so proud of our role in helping American consumers save money on prescription drugs by purchasing from licensed Canadian and international pharmacies.
This is part of a lecture by Dr. Marcia Angell, the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, and now a lecturer at Harvard. She explains why drug prices are so high for U.S. consumers; namely, that pharmaceutical companies spend too much on marketing and on creating “me too” drugs to extend their patents — while producing no real innovation.
I hope you find it educational.
Patents were created to protect inventors’ right to their discoveries and to promote the progress of society. But over time, the drug industry has come to know patents as a money-printing machine. Today, drug patents actually work against their original purpose — discouraging real innovation in the pharmaceutical industry.
The most profitable venture for drug companies is stretching out the patent of a billion-dollar drug. Patents make it illegal for a competitor to sell the same drug for a certain period of time. The longer a drug company can stretch out the patent life, the more money it can make. Extending a patent a few extra months translates into millions of dollars of added revenue.
Once a drug company’s patent expires, generic versions of the patented drug can be produced and sold. Since brand-name drugs never lower their prices in response to competition, drug sales plummet. Pharmagossip discusses this further in its post, Big Pharma’s Big Problem contd. – the rise of generics in the US. If only one generic is produced, sales of the brand-name drug remain relatively high because generics only lower their prices in response to competition. But if 50 generics are released, prices fall drastically and the life of the brand-name drug is essentially over.
For this reason, Big Pharma focuses most of its new product development efforts on “gaming” the federal government to extend patent and exclusivity rights. Drug makers essentially retest the same drug for other uses in order to lengthen the exclusivity period.
A good example is Schering-Plough’s Claritin, the antihistamine. Claritin’s patent and exclusivity rights were nearing expiration, so the drug maker retested Claritin with the FDA for slightly different uses and called it Clarinex. Schering-Plough then launched a huge promotional campaign to switch users from Claritin to Clarinex because it was an “improvement” over the existing drug, even though its chemical composition is almost identical. More on this common practice here, with a specific discussion of Claritin/Clarinex here.
How long will consumers put up with this kind of duplicity?
Subscribe in a reader